The Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous network that has inspired many companies to rely upon it as a major resource for doing business. For example, many businesses may utilize the Internet, and similar networking infrastructures, to manage critical applications, access content servers, automate assembly and production lines, and implement complex control systems. Moreover, many individuals expect to have access to a resource at virtually any time. As the reliance by businesses on access to such networked resources for their success increases, the availability of the systems that provide these services becomes even more critical.
A blade device is one type of computing device component that allows a user to provision servers, application, or other computing resources on an individual card, or “blade”. These blades are housed together with shared resources such as power supplies and cooling fans in a chassis, creating a high-density system with a modular architecture that provides improved flexibility and scalability. Blade servers can enable the operation of multiple servers in a relatively small footprint, reduce rack complexity, simplify cabling and reduce energy consumption. These characteristics tend to make it advantageous to implement cooperative computing clusters using blade servers. Also, blade servers are often employed in space-constrained and energy conscious environments, such as data centers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
However, upgrading the hardware or software of blade devices in a computing environment is often a difficult, time consuming, and error-prone process. Further, implementing an upgrade can negatively impact the connection-handling and other processes of the environment being upgraded. Blade servers may represent one example of members in a cluster network. However, other types of cluster-based network devices may have similar problems during hardware and/or software upgrades. Also, upgrading hypervisors or privileged hardware managers in a virtualized traffic manager may stop the operation of any other virtual traffic manager instances running on that hardware. If those virtual machines are critical components in an application delivery system, then upgrading can create a costly disruption to a user's applications. Also, this type of disruption can cause cross-organizational challenges when coordinating upgrades across the various organizations responsible for each virtual machine. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the invention has been made.